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Adversities are a part of living, and we choose the way we react to each adversity in our lives. I would be the last to deny that adversities can be exceedingly difficult. Many times they will be senseless, unfair, painful, and beyond our control to prevent. However, they come into our lives for a reason. We can choose to learn valuable lessons from each adversity we encounter.

Learning Valuable Life Lessons

Marvin J. Ashton (1915-1994) said, “Adversity will surface in every life. How we meet it makes the difference.”

Tough times, events, and circumstances can teach us much about ourselves and other people. They bring us face to face with our honesty, integrity, sense of personal responsibility, and ways of dealing with life’s blows.

Initially, we want to bury our hurt and grief deeply inside rather than experience painful emotions. However, before the pain and grief will subside, we must pick up the pieces. We must fully move through these feelings of discouragement, grief, and pain, allowing ourselves complete emotional expression before the pain will ease its hold.

In the process of allowing ourselves to feel our emotions completely, we learn valuable life lessons. We also discover how resilient and strong we are at any given point in our life. If we look closely at each adversity, we become wiser to life’s ways, our ways, and people’s ways. Each adversity we encounter can bring new insight into human nature.

As tough as life’s lessons sometimes are, each holds the seed of an equal or greater blessing, a pathway to new growth as a human being. It is our responsibility to learn each lesson. Otherwise, we will be handed a more difficult scenario of the same lesson again. The lessons we are meant to learn will reappear until we learn them completely.

Discovering Blessings and Wisdom

The more difficult the adversity, the more valuable will be the lessons it offers to teach. By exercising faith in a Power greater than ourselves, we discover we are not alone in any adversity. We learn to see blessings appearsometimes years laterthat we would not have received had we not been handed tough times.

To find these blessings, we must expect them and watch for them to appear. To reap their benefits, we must believe that we deserve them and accept them with absolute faith when they are offered to us. If we do not accept them, they will often times not wait around for us to change our minds.

Ask yourself the following seven questions, and write down your answers:

In what ways have I dealt with adversity that were effective and ineffective?

How have my ways of dealing with adversity affected other people and me?

Have I accepted responsibility for my life’s circumstances and the times that my actions have resulted in adversity?

What have my adversities taught me about my honesty, integrity, sense of personal responsibility, and my faith in other people and myself?

What have my adversities taught me about human nature and how the actions of other people tend to influence how I react to their behaviors?

How can I react to adversity in a way that will better allow me to grow wiser, more resilient, and more loving?

What is my personal faith that brings me the greatest strength in times of adversity?”

The Choice is Yours

Even when life becomes painfully unfair, you have a choice. You can choose to learn the most valuable of life’s lessons now or later. You can reap the greatest of life’s rewards by choosing to see adversities as God-given universities. You can accept the blessings they offer to you.

Questioning yourself about each adversity will teach you more about yourself and about human nature. It will help you to learn the life lessons that will bring the only true measure of success: inner growth and a more principle-centered life. You will experience a stronger faith in the possibilities of the future.

© Copyright 2005 by Steve Brunkhorst. Steve is a professional life success coach, motivational author, and the editor of Achieve! 60-Second Nuggets of Inspiration, a popular ezine bringing great stories, motivational nuggets, and inspiring thoughts to help you achieve more in your career and personal life. Get the next issue by visiting http://www.AchieveEzine.com

One of the most important things to recognize is that, like any e-motion - energy in motion - suicidal feelings, for the most part, pass (at least in 90,089 out of 100,000 of us in the United States!)

Who amongst us does not entertain the thought now and again? During particularly stressful periods of my life, I’ve encountered the urge, while crossing a bridge, to jerk the steering wheel hard right and the car over the guardrail into a 200 foot drop to the riverbed below.

Within the last year, I read a news article that stated the incidence of successful attempted suicides by people in Japan is statistically much higher then here, in the U.S. The article stated specifically that the most prevalent means of attempted suicide here is overdosing on Valium, our most abundant mood-altering drug.

I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself, remembering the slews of young people who I picked up that, sure they’d never wake up again, found themselves alive with the increased misery of a whopping hangover for the next few days after getting their stomachs pumped. But this was a reflection of my own unwillingness to look deeper.

Most of the attempted overdoses that I attended were done publicly in some way, with an element of certainty that someone would know or find out within a few hours. To be honest, unless I found around three empty bottles of the stuff right next to the unconscious person, I didn’t worry much.

I’ve picked up many who lay in their beds, unconscious and snoring for three days after having ingested handfuls of the stuff. Care was really simple; open an intravenous line, protect the airway, and boogie to the hospital. To me, teenaged suicide was largely a call for help based on a current, perceived threat of some sort. In the US, the hope is that these calls for help will be answered.

But in Japan, where pharmaceuticals are not so readily available, the substance of choice is one or another form of poison or pesticide, which are by no means as forgiving as Valium. That’s where the statistics tell a story: Where the numbers separate is that in Japan, attempted suicides are much more likely to be successful. U.S. rate of successful suicide is about 11 per 100,000 in population (average - all ages and sexes), whereas in Japan, it’s about 25 per 100,000.

That proportion sent a chill down my spine. In America, lots of kids for example, who are grappling with questions of life and death can come to a temporary, albeit, morbid conclusion, take action on it, and then get a second chance. This is not as likely over there.

That’s quite sad, but I suspect that the high proportion is also a by-product of the Japanese cultural imperative to not speak of such things. I also suspect that if the kids really knew and believed that what they were doing was highly likely to do them in, they wouldn’t. Here, almost every teen knows someone who has gone the Valium route and failed.

My approach, as a counselor, (which, admittedly, is a hell of a lot more compassionate than when I was a medic and a direct result of having to deal with it time and again, under all sorts of circumstances — a humbling experience to say the least!) is to first and foremost accept that the person threatening suicide is serious. No matter what I think, their lives have come to circumstances that tell them it’s a viable option. I honor it as such.

Most people mobilize everything at their disposal to stop, deny, sidestep or avoid the patterns or actions that might promote the thought of suicide. When I start with something like, “Yeah, that is an option”, those with less conviction will sometimes stop in their tracks, all by themselves, and begin exploring other options.

People so often discount words implying the thought of suicide (”Oh, that’s ridiculous, you have a wonderful life!”) that even the suicidal don’t really get that it’s about really ending their lives. Many of them just want to end the apparent pain of the moment. Placing death clearly into the picture, and working with it as a valid possibility means it becomes real and something that can be actually worked with in most situations.

A consistent underlying theme of potential suicides is they feel like they cannot have an effect on their worlds. Many can’t, but that boils down to not being able to have the effect that they want to have. The opening I seek is to explore effects that they can have in the now that will be enough to get them through to tomorrow.

Sometimes, the person will place a roadblock in front of every path out that I offer. In that case, I ask, “Okay, were I to support you in your committing suicide, what would that look like?” I open the door to discussion completely. More often than not, this approach provides a bit of leverage to work with because you’re meeting, not resisting.

But at all times, the most effective approach is to do what it takes to ground the person in the immediate experience of now. If the person manages to make it to you, their current reality is that they are with someone who cares enough to value them and work with them as a respected and honored human being, going through the same process of life we all face.

By placing the person’s attention fully on the moment that is, rather than on agonizing over what was or what they fear will be, you can help them get to the next moment. Ultimately, that’s the goal: to work with the person so that they have enough experiences in the supported now to make a decision for life. Enough of these moments strung together provide a Path to the future that includes hope. Often, that’s enough.

Sometimes it’s not enough, but only because free-will trumps all. And that’s okay, too!

Russ Reina shares over 35 years of experience in the healing arts through his web site http://mauihealingartist.com. It is a potent resource for those wishing to deepen their abilities in connection and develop their powers as healers. For a powerful free tool to explore your inner world, please check out his adjunct site http://thestoryofthis.net (Permission is granted to reprint this article, unedited, provided proper attribution is made and the signature line — the above resource paragraph — is kept intact)